Paris under the Commune eBook

three doors are opened by three enormous false keys,
the work of a member of the Commune, locksmith by
trade, who has remained faithful to the cause of M.
Lullier; and last, but not least, the sentinels, plunged
in ecstasy at the sight of the glorious fugitive,
present arms. What a scene for a melodrama!
The most interesting figure, however, in my opinion,
is the secretary. I have the greatest respect
for that secretary, who never dreamt one instant of
abandoning his master, and I can see him, while Lullier
is accomplishing his miracles, calmly writing in the
midst of the danger, with a firm hand, the faithful
account of these immortal adventures. “I
have now,” continues the ex-prisoner of the
ex-Prefecture, “two hundred determined men, who
serve me as a guard, and three excellent revolvers,
loaded, in my pocket. I had foolishly remained
too long without arms and without friends; now I am
resolved to blow the brains out of the first man who
tries to arrest me!” I heard a bourgeois who
had read this exclaim, that he wished to Heaven each
member of the Commune would come to arrest him in
turn. Oh! blood-thirsty bourgeois! Then Lullier
finishes up by declaring that he scorns to hide, but
continues to show himself freely and openly on the
boulevards. What a proud, what a noble nature!
Oh, ye marionettes, ye fantoccini! Yet let me
not be unjust; I will try and believe in you once
more, in spite of armed requisitions, in spite of
arrests, of robberies—­for there have been
robberies in spite of your decrees—­I will
try and believe that you have not only taken possession
of the Hotel de Ville for the purpose of setting up
a Punch and Judy show and playing your sinister farces;
I want to believe that you had and still have honourable
and avowable intentions; that it is only your natural
inexperience joined to the difficulties of the moment
which is the cause of your faults and your follies;
I want to believe that there are among you, even after
the successive dismissal of so many of your members,
some honourable men who deplore the evil that has been
done, who wish to repair it, and who will try to make
us forget the crimes and forfeits of the civil war
by the benefits which revolution sometimes brings
in its train. Yes, I am naturally full of hope,
and will try and believe this; but, honestly, what
hope can you have of inspiring confidence in those
who are not prejudiced as I am in favour of innovators,
when they see you arrest each other in this fashion,
and know that you have among you such generals as
Bergeret, such honest citizens as Assy, and such escaped
lunatics as Lullier?

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 42: Assy, who first became publicly
known as the leader of the strike at Messrs. Schneider’s
works at Creuzot, was an engineer. He was born
in 1840. He became a member of the International
Society, and was selected in 1870 to organise the
Creuzot strike. Being threatened with arrest,
he went to Paris, but did not remain there long, and
on the 21st of March in that year, a few days after
his return to Creuzot, the strike of the miners commenced.
Assy was, finally, arrested and tried before the Correctional
Tribune of Paris as chief and founder of a secret
society, but he was acquitted of that charge.